Press release 1 June 2007

Give the Chinese students their history back!

In 1989 the Chinese students were massacred on the Square of the Heavenly Peace. The students had been occupying the square for months in an attempt to press the Chinese government to take steps towards democracy and to fight against corruption. But on 4^th June 1989 the regime threw in the army against the students.

The story is banned in China, but all the students’ newspaper articles, fliers etc. have been collected by the democracy movement in Hong Kong. These collections of documents have now been scanned and put on the Internet from where they can be downloaded for free, see

http://www.aidoh.dk/4june89

Many of the young dissidents imprisoned in the wake of the crackdown are still in jail and no longer young. Nevertheless the world’s leaders are doing ´business as usual´ with the totalitarian regime in Beijing. They are considering cancelling the weapon’s embargo and other sanctions implemented as a protest against the massacre.

Thousands of Chinese students are studying at universities and other institutions of education in the West. Most of them do not know their own history. Therefore we invite all pro-democracy institutions and scholars to download and print out this documentation or burn it on a CD, place it on the shelves of their libraries and hand it out as a gift to their Chinese students on 4^th June, the anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre. In this way we can make a contribution to preserve the memory of the victims and maybe inspire a new generation of Chinese to democracy as a possibility also for China.

We call on everybody to support this initiative and to mail this appeal to other institutions of education where there are Chinese students or others who might be interested in preserving and distributing the knowledge about the Tiananmen massacre.

The initiative of this appeal and informative campaign is a co-operation between the democracy movement in Hong Kong and Danish sculptor Jens Galschiot who has put up an 8 metre high Pillar of Shame in Hong Kong to commemorate the Tiananmen massacre.

The documents about Tiananmen: http://www.aidoh.dk/4june89

The democracy movement in Hong Kong:

HK Alliance in Support of Patriotic Democratic Movements of China

Inquiry phone number: 852-2782-6111, Fax number: 852-2770-6083
E-mail address: contact@alliance.org.hk
Website: http://www.alliance.org.hk

About human Rights in China:

http://www.aidoh.dk/China

Contact to Jens Galschiot:

E-mail: aidoh@aidoh.dk, Internet: http://www.aidoh.dk, tel. +45 6618 4058

Banevaenget 22, DK-5270 Odense N, Denmark